Julian Borger reports on the gutting of the State Department office responsible for implementing and negotiating arms control treaties:

A state department office tasked with negotiating and implementing nuclear disarmament treaties has lost more than 70% of its staff over the past two years, as the Trump administration moves towards a world without arms control for the first time in nearly half a century.

The Office of Strategic Stability and Deterrence Affairs, normally a repository of expertise and institutional knowledge that does the heavy lifting of arms control, has been whittled down from 14 staffers at the start of the Trump administration to four, according to the former staffers. The state department declined to comment.

The state department has instead focussed its arms control efforts on “creating the environment for disarmament” (CEND)shifting the onus for disarmament from the nuclear weapons powers to non-weapons states.

An invitation to a 2 July state department conference on the subject invites non-nuclear states to come up with “measures to modify the security environment to reduce incentives for states to retain, acquire, or increase their holdings of nuclear weapons”.

The Trump administration has expressed no interest in extending New START, and this major reduction in relevant staff confirms that they have neither the intention nor the ability to carry on serious arms control talks with Russia or anyone else. Negotiations for extending New START, which expires in 2021, should have already begun, but if Bolton has anything to say about it they will never take place. Russia has expressed a willingness to extend the treaty, but so far they have not had any answer from the Trump administration. Borger continues:

Vladimir Putin has said Russia is in favour of a New Start extension, but warned that time is running out.

“If we do not begin talks now, it would be over because there would be no time even for formalities,” Putin told the Financial Times.

Bolton’s position that the treaty shouldn’t be extended as it is, but would have to be expanded to include other classes of nuclear weapons, is an obvious non-starter for the Russians. Even if there were a chance of negotiating a more comprehensive treaty, there is no time to get it done before New START dies. When Bolton claims that a new treaty could be concluded quickly, he is just making an excuse for running out the clock. Meanwhile, the administration has done nothing that suggests it would be ready to negotiate with Russia about anything:

But former officials and arms control experts in Congress say there have been no serious consideration of what to do when New Start expires in February 2021.

“There is no one home,” a congressional staffer involved in arms control said. “There is no serious effort to come up with a plan. There is nothing real going on.”

Trump has occasionally talked up the possibility of negotiating a treaty that involves both Russia and China, but this makes no sense to the Chinese government, whose nuclear arsenal is much smaller than the American and Russian ones. Like the feigned interest in a “better deal” with Iran, the idea of a trilateral arms control treaty is a way to destroy the existing arms control architecture while pretending to want an improved treaty. The significance of slashing staff at this office is that it deprives the department of the manpower and expertise to conduct arms control negotiations. This would be a serious problem even if the administration were inclined to hold talks regarding New START extension or a new agreement, but it is even more alarming because it signals that the administration is abandoning arms control entirely. Borger’s report goes on:

Pranay Vaddi, a former member of the strategic stability office, said: “The main mission and that office is implementing the existing arms control agreements with Russia the nuclear ones, New Start and INF and the sort of running the interagency process.”

After an exodus of most of the office’s staffers at the end of last year, Vaddi said: “The bottom line is that, for a myriad of reasons, the state department isn’t equipped [to pursue arms control negotiations]”

Few experts believe that the downgrading of the state department’s capacity to negotiate disarmament agreements is a case of negligence. It is more widely seen as a deliberate strategy directed by John Bolton [bold mine-DL], Trump’s national security adviser, and a lifelong opponent of arms control agreements which he sees as unnecessary constraints on US sovereignty.

The president has only rarely mentioned the arms reduction treaty, but because it was concluded and ratified under his predecessor he has always been hostile to it. It has probably not been very difficult for Bolton to persuade Trump to kill off yet another Obama-era agreement. In addition to demolishing the last of Obama’s foreign policy legacy, this will mean the destruction of the last remnant of the arms control architecture that Bolton has been hammering away at his entire career. It will make the U.S., Russia, and the entire world less secure, and it will open the door to a ruinous and dangerous arms race. Backsliding on disarmament by the two largest nuclear weapons states is bound to undermine the nonproliferation regime as well.

Daryl Kimball reminds us of what it means if New START dies:

Without New START, there would be no legally binding, verifiable limits on the U.S. or Russian nuclear arsenals for the first time in nearly half a century. Today, the treaty caps the number of deployed warheads at 1,550 for each side; if that ceiling expires, Russia and the United States could upload hundreds of additional nuclear warheads to their long-range delivery systems.

There is no good reason to let New START expire. Letting the treaty die would be destabilizing, and it would end one of the few remaining areas of cooperation with Russia. Bolton wants to burn down the last arms control treaty that remains for purely ideological reasons that have nothing to do with the security of the United States. Few individuals have done more to undermine the causes of disarmament and nonproliferation than Bolton, and a major part of Trump’s legacy will be that he gave this hard-line arsonist the opportunity to destroy the work of decades that made the world safer.